Vertically disposed file material held in a drawer or a cabinet has been conventionally indexed by inserts provided with upright index tabs readily visible over the upper edge of the file material. Such upright index tabs have conventionally been disposed longitudinally of the file material, cabinet, or drawer and succeeding tabs have been laterally offset across the width of the file material for convenient observation and identification.
In vertical filing of original drawings, charts, maps, graphics, or sets of plans of different width, intermixing of drawing sizes may occur. An exemplary cabinet for such filing may be a Plan Hold Master File in which a cabinet housing is provided with a hinged top wall and a front wall which is slidably or rollably mounted for movement forwardly of the cabinet and its contents for convenient access to vertically filed sheet material within the cabinet housing. The vertically filed material is supported on a plurality of laterally spaced hollow cylindrical rods carried by the back wall of the housing and within which are telescopically received pins carried by the separable front wall.
In such a system, index guides have been used comprising a longitudinally extending strip member provided with holes corresponding to the spacing of the support rods and upright tabs which extend above the top edges of the file materials. Such index tabs were generally longitudinally aligned at the outboard edge portions of the strip. Further, a separate longitudinal strip member containing a chart of identification of drawings withdrawn from the file was provided with openings corresponding to the support members and was placed on the support members when drawings or a group of drawings were withdrawn from the file cabinet to indicate absence of such drawings and the party who had withdrawn the drawings. Such a strip bore and the word "OUT" to indicate which had been removed from the cabinet housing.
Such prior proposed index guide means and OUT strips did not fulfill all of the requirements of flexible, comprehensive, facile indexing of the drawings because the upright tabs were aligned in longitudinally extending rows and the OUT strips were separately located on the support members. An additional step of shifting drawings to reach the OUT strips was often required to properly record information on the OUT label.